The
story of the house that fell through the ice of Lake Superior off the shores
of MadelineIsland brought comic relief to the
cold winter of 1977.

After a
January when temperatures in ChequamegonBay rarely rose above zero the idea
that moving a 30-ton truck from Port Superior to LaPointe, Wisconsin
almost made sense. Almost.

“They
wanted me to plow the road,” said Bill McCarty of Bayfield. “I
said no.”

The
seven-room, fully furnished house only made three of the four miles to
Madeline March 2. The truck broke through the ice and eventually pulled the
vacation home to the bottom of Lake Superior.

The
story made international news. It came less than two years after the Edmund
Fitzgerald went down and only five months after Gordon Lightfoot’s song
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald reached No. 2 on the Billboard
charts.

The
picture of the house sitting crooked in the broken ice ran from Miami to Tel Aviv. The
Los Angeles Times ran it on the front page.

One
picture taken later in the month showed the sign warning drivers that the
regular ice road from Bayfield to LaPointe was unsafe for cars. Someone
painted an addition: “and houses.”

Like all
good news stories it stayed around for an encore. The Coast Guard ordered the
owners to remove it in the spring from its 90-foot deep resting place.

Divers worked with Ed Erickson, owner and
skipper of the scow OuterIsland to lift it to the
surface in May. Then the bottom fell out. All that was left at the end were
pieces on a dock and a waterlogged truck.

Duluth and Minneapolis media were on hand. Headlines
spread across the wire services.

Like the
Edmund Fitzgerald, the house story had its own song, “It Sunk,”
written by Washburn cop and folksinger Tim Chaney, now of Hayward. He and Phil Anich of Washburn sang
the song regularly through the 1980s and 1990s in clubs around the bay and at
the Ashland Folk Festival at Northland.

“I
heard about the house through the song,” said Tom Martin Erickson, host
of Wisconsin Public Radio’s Simply Folk.

I was a
reporter for the Washburn-Bayfield County Times then. They were moving the
house on a Wednesday, the day we went to press. I covered the event in my
1965 Volkswagen bug, driving nearly a mile out from LaPointe to wait for the
truck to come.

The
house tilted off the driver’s side and looked like it fell off the
trailer. I drove up and found the late Lyle Rhine, the driver warming his
hands.

The
truck was still running and in gear. Moments later, the ice cracked and the
timber of the house moaned as the truck sank with a gurgle from its exhaust
pipe.

I raced
back to the newspaper office in Washburn and yelled to Editor Don Albrecht,
“Hold the presses!”

Lyle
Rhine of Dale Movers, a Minneapolis company
drives through the Port Superior Marina on March 2, 1977 with a house he was
carrying across the ice to MadelineIsland. “I
wouldn’t try it if I didn’t think I could make it,” Rhine said. Harvey Nourse of Bayfield, who knew Lake Superior well, rode along.

About three
quarters of the way across the road plowed just for the moving trip the tires
of the trailer broke through the ice and with the truck still running and in
gear Rhine poses. “Rocky you’ve
got your story,” he said.

I walked around the house and was standing on the west
side when my partner yelled that the truck was sinking. I clicked my shutter
just at the moment it went under.

In May,
divers worked with Ed Erickson, owner of the LCTOuterIsland to lift the
house from the bottom 90 feet down. They successfully brought the waterlogged
house to the surface but the bottom fell out. They did recover the truck.

It Sunk

Copyright
1977 Tim Chaney

He came through the forest
and he had a song to sing.

About concrete walls and
neon halls and place to sit and eat.

He told of the story of a
land that he would build.

With flashing lights and
city folks and fountains that he drilled.

It sunk.

Then he planned to bring
some boats from ports near and wide.

Yes Canada would
bring her boats to the pride of our side.

And when the first boat
entered into his harbor deep and wide.

The captain yelled across
the horn he had no place to hide.

It sunk.

And then he planned to take
his toys across the distance shore.

And no one ever thought
that they would see his house no more.

Yes the timber cracked and
the men were crying and there was a mighty sound.